Studio711.com – Ben Martens

The door to our garage has a spring in the hinge so it closes automatically. That’s generally handy but I’m waiting for it to smash Elijah’s hand. He has to hold onto the door frame to step down. So to help keep all his fingers attached, I pulled out some scrap wood and built a little hand hold for him. It was a one night project using an old broom stick as the round piece to grip and so far it’s working out really well.

After a couple failed projects, I was looking for a quick win and decided to make some wooden mallets. They’re handy for assembly wood parts. The big wood face is gentler on your project than a standard hammer. There are a lot of different ways to approach the project, but I chose to use Jay Bates’s laminated method.

First I had to choose some wood. When we got married, Tyla already had an old, beat up oak dining table. She always dreamed of refinishing it, but last summer we agreed it was better to just get rid of it instead of continuing to store it. I salvaged quite a bit of wood from it. It has just been sitting in the side of the garage and I decided to make use of it. I grabbed one leaf and rain it through the planer to get all the old finish off of it. It cleaned up nicely.

After that the rest was pretty simple. The head is built from three layers of wood with the middle layer being chopped in half to make a hole for the handle. The handle is tapered so it slides into the hole and sticks there. When finished, the handle can be detached from the mallet by just pounding it through. There’s not much too it but I think it will come in handy.

I made two thinking that I’d probably screw one up, but both came out reasonably nice so I gave one to Tim since we were heading to his house for dinner that night.

Our process for getting things done at work involves a lot of sticky notes. The person who has the office closest to the tracking board inevitably ends up with a huge pile of Post It Notes in their office. I decided it would be more handy to have them right on the wall next to the board so I grabbed a scrap piece of maple and set to work. I had a stack of post it notes on hand and kind of planned the design as I went. It’s held onto the wall with a French cleat and to hide that, I etched the Microsoft logo into some maple veneer.

Many months ago, Tyla shared an idea to have some shelves in the family room to hold Elijah’s toys. It would not only be a place to store things, but also a place to rotate different toys on display to encourage Elijah to play on his own. I kept finding excuses to do other things but finally I decided to give it a go.

I started with a drawing in Sketchup to get an idea of the spacing and also make sure that Tyla was on board with the design. The whole structure ended up being 7 feet long. I’ve learned that big projects are a bit tough to deal with in the garage, but this was an easy one, right?

I ran into quite a few problems when building these. I did the initial glueup wrong and had to rip the nails out before the glue dried to start over. The edge banding didn’t stick nicely in all the areas. And I miscalculated and made the drawers 1/2″ too wide. But that’s part of the fun of woodworking. Nothing goes perfectly, at least in my workshop, and I’m presented with lots of opportunities to find interesting solutions. One of my favorite YouTube woodworkers is Steve Ramsey and when he has a major screwup, he makes the fix and says that it’s now “EXTRA FANCY!” These shelves are definitely extra fancy, but you know what? They work. Elijah is just going to beat them up anyway. I’m not building an heirloom. I’m building a toy shelf that we’ll throw in a bonfire after he’s older and we want something else there instead.

The bottom two drawers are only half as deep as the opening. Ever since we moved in, we’ve had a cardboard box covering up a bunch of ugly wires and a battery backup for the TV. I designed a void behind the drawers where I can hide all that stuff and there is also a space for a bunch of cables to run the length of the shelves back to the plugs. The top of the unit still fits snugly against the wall so all that is finally hidden.

Given the size of the project, I wanted to try spraying them. I even borrowed Don’s paint sprayer, but when I finally got around to spraying, the air was full of seeds and pollen. I ended up just taking the time to brush and roll it all, sanding between coats.

Now it’s on to the next project… it will definitely be something smaller!

Church asked if I’d be willing to make a “prayer box” for church. The idea is that people can write down prayer requests on pieces of paper, put them in the box, and then Pastor will remember them in his prayers. There were no design requirements so I chatted about some ideas, got a thumbs up and I was off and running to Crosscut Hardwoods to pick up a nice hunk of 5/4 cherry.

I wanted to play with my box joint jig again so I decided to do box joints. Unfortunately my first attempt failed because I didn’t clamp it well and the box wasn’t square when I was done. Instead of waste all that nice cherry wood, I sawed off the joints, cut some new box joints and then glued it together. So the box ended up smaller than I intended but I think it worked ok.

For the lid, I wanted to try a panel raising bit. I picked one up from Rockler and carefully cut the profile on the lid. It’s a huge router bit so it’s a little scary to use. I slowed the router way down and nibbled at the cut until it was the depth that I needed. I added a very thin layer of wood on the bottom of the lid that perfectly fits inside the box. So when you put the lid on, it is always centered and won’t slide off.

To make the box a little more special, I took it to the laser cutter and etched the church logo into the front of it. Dad was here when I did that so it was a good excuse to show him the laser cutter. Thankfully my testing was spot on and the logo ended up perfectly centered.

Instead of having people lift off the top to insert their cards, I wanted to put a slot in the top. But why just do a straight slot? I made it a cross. This was trickier than I had intended and I had trouble centering the cuts. Thankfully I had started with a very small slot so I switched to a wider slot and was able to cover up my mistake.

The final step was making a base for it. That was just a chunk of cherry and I used the router to remove the bottom half of the board except for the four feet on the corner.

For the finish I used an equal mixture of boiled linseed oil, mineral oil and wipe on poly. Four coats of that with a scrub from a synthetic pad in between coats completed the project.